Venice is the first urban theme park.  Like any other theme park. it is full of attractions, but impractical for everyday living.  And, with 60,000 residents and 16 million annual visitors, a majority of the people you find in Venice at any time are tourists.

       The ratio of tourists to residents will rise inexorably.  Economic growth will add hundreds of millions to the numbers of potential visitors, while the erosion of permanent residents, who face the high price of accommodation and the low availability of groceries and hairdressers, will continue.  The economic logic that leads people to visit Venice for their honeymoon but not to discuss their pension plan will forever dictate the structure of Venice’s economy.

With a tourist majority Venice should be managed as a tourist city, not a municipality.  Rather as a national park is managed as a tourist area rather than a rural parish.  Aesthetes are appalled by the comparison between Venice and Disneyland.  But Venice is as artificial as Disneyland.  It ceased to be a significant commercial and political centre over two hundred years ago.

       But the successors of the Doges of Venice are the politicians of modern Italy, and Venice today lacks the competent management that the Disney Corporation would provide.  And without competent management, the race is on to see whether the city sinks first under a sea of tourists or beneath the waves of the Adriatic. If tourists paid the €50 admission to Disneyland as an admission fee to Venice, the proceeds would find the barrier needed to protect Venice from the sea, finance urgently needed preservation activities, and permit construction of amenities that would better meet the needs of tourists while preserving the character of the city.

The Disney Corporation would ensure that Venice is preserved because the Disney Corporation cares about the value of its assets.  Venice’s Mayor, who cares about re-election, opposes the barrier in favour of something better and cheaper, without being specific about what that is.  The Disney Corporation wants its guests to have a good time because it cares whether they come back. Most residents of the city would rather that visitors didn’t come back, Disney is paranoid about its brand but no one owns the brand that is Venice.

       If the first thing visitors to Venice remember is the magnificence of the setting, the second is the frequency with which they were ripped off.  The point of a €50 charge is not to make tourists pay through the nose:  they already do.  It is €6 to board a vaporetto, overpriced tat flanks the Rialto and the Accademia and  the most expensive coffee in the world is served to bad music on St Mark’s Square.  The point of an admission charge is to divert the money visitors already pay from the black hole of Italian politics and the greedy merchants of Venice to the preservation and enhancement of the –tourist – amenities of the City.

       Bewildered Asian tourists wander round St Mark’s Square, taking photographs of each other and feeding the innumerable pigeons. Venice, a tourist city, needs to serve its tourists better.  Imagine, instead,  a visitor centre, that explained the role Venice played in the development of Western civilisation and – thought not everyone will like it – in the development of Western capitalism:  a pioneer of globalisation.    Imagine also a Venice, off-season, closed to day tourists, allowing those who most love the city to experience it as Ruskin must have experienced it.

The problems of Venice are not problems of technology or finance, but problems of politics, organisation and management.  Historical accident has placed the jewels of Western Europe culture and civilisation in the hands of Western Europe’s most dysfunctional political system. When Ulysses S Grant created the first national park, he emphasised that America’s natural wonders belonged, not just to the people who lived nearby, but to the nation as a whole.  The implication was that the nation as a whole had both rights of access and responsibilities of management.  Europe’s man-made wonders belong, not just to the people who live near them, but to the inheritors of European civilisation.  These legatees have both rights of access and responsibilities of management.  Disney is not the best answer:  but anything would be better than the squabbles, corruption and delays of Italian politics.